Week 3 -- Bunyarit

This week I spent most of my time doing a research project. My research project is to determine the effect of 2 different strategies on continence of patients after robotic-assisted prostatectomy. The inspiration of this project is triggered by the reason that after the surgery, patients are incontinence, which is the inability to empty their bladder voluntarily. Consequently, the patients have to be inserted by small tube in an effort to empty their bladder. After the tubes are removed, the patients have to use pads, and what I would like to know is how fast they can recover their continence.  Until now, there are 2 different types of tube that has been used for Dr. Tewari’s patients, that is, superpubic tube and foley. In this week, my college and I had to gather the data regarding the continence of Dr. Tewari’s patients from 2006 to 2012. The data collected was the ability of the patient to be continence. If the patiences are continence, we assigned as 1. If not, they are assigned as 0. In addition, the number of week that the patient recovered their bladder function was gathered for consideration.

Besides the project, I participated the meeting called “Prostate Cancer Working Group Meeting”. The meeting was held within urology department and every research group attended the meeting. The agenda of this meeting was about current research conducted by physicians in urology department. An interesting research was associated with the new approach for diagnosing prostate cancer. The method was involved circulating tumor DNA, which is DNA released from cancerous cells into blood stream. I also shadowed two medical students in my lab to discuss MRI pictures of a patient with a radiologist to determine if there is tumor inside prostate gland. The results showed that the prostate gland has tumor that locate on the right side. It was the first time I saw MRI picture of prostate gland and the medical students taught me how to interpret information from MRI picture.